Two Spot Colours Is a Better Brief Than Full Colour
The constraint that made the coffee packaging work, and why we now suggest it unprompted.
A client with eleven products and a thin margin cannot afford four-colour process on every SKU. That constraint produced a better system than an unlimited palette would have.
Spot Colour Is Cheaper at Volume
Two spots on a long run costs meaningfully less than CMYK, and the colour is consistent between runs in a way process printing struggles to match. For anything with a fixed brand colour, that consistency is worth as much as the saving.
Constraints Force Structure
With two inks you cannot rely on colour to do the differentiating, so something else has to. In the Kilbeggan work it became a large origin numeral, which turned out to carry at shelf distance far better than a colour difference would have.
Overprinting Gives You a Third Colour Free
Two inks printed over one another produce a third. Designed for deliberately rather than avoided, this gives a three-colour system at a two-colour price — and it is where the studio’s name comes from.
When Not To
Photography. If the product needs a photographic image, spot colour is the wrong tool and pretending otherwise produces something that looks like a compromise. Know which problem you have before choosing the constraint.
